If a rocket falls in a forest…
Operation Dnipro Shield opened on a hot June morning with a single shot.
The Finnish Queen Hornet drone crossed the shattered cease-fire’s 10 km wide DMZ below the treeline, rising only to clear fences, or skirt buildings shattered in the last war. Unlike most of the drones that would be sweeping south over the DMZ near Nesterianka that morning, this one was piloted.
“Three technicians on the tower. I can take the shot from here and get the target plus three kills,” the drone pilot said to his spotter, who had located the target with his Lightning ISR drone a half hour earlier and was holding 2 km away to record the kill. “Range is 1,200 meters,” the spotter said. “They might hear you and drop from their perch before you fire, but the target is the transmitter, not the personnel. I’d get closer, just to be sure of hitting.”
The cell phone tower was Russia’s typically low-tech, low-cost answer to the effectiveness of Coalition and Ukrainian jamming of their GLONASS and Rassvet satellite networks. The high-power, demountable towers and transmitters were spread across the contact line, forming a mesh network that enabled Russia to burn through jamming and keep digital links alive for their soldiers and drone operators. “I know you would get closer,” the pilot said, lining up his sights on the transmitter at the top of the slightly swaying 20-meter-high tower. Two technicians were working on it; a third was on a ladder below them, passing tools back and forth. “And you probably should. I’m not you.”
He checked the windage indicator in his heads-up display and compared it to what he was seeing on the trees around the base of the tower. The recoilless rifle slung under the Queen Hornet was a single-shot, point-and-shoot weapon, armed with a 1 kg thermobaric warhead that had a destructive range of about 10 meters. A bad miss would simply fly wide and explode harmlessly, giving the technicians up the tower nothing more than a scare.
The lanky six-foot, prematurely bald pilot’s name was Alikersantti (corporal) Ukko ‘Simo’ Häyhä, of the Finnish Rapid Deployment Force, and he didn’t even consider the possibility he might miss. He piloted his drone quickly to 200 feet altitude, lined up the target in his crosshairs, checked the wind one last time, watched the slight sway of the tower carefully, then lifted the crosshairs upward—to allow for the curve of the shot—and to the right of the target, to allow for the sway. He did the math in his head. Range, one thousand one hundred eighty-seven. Projectile speed, 190 meters per second. Travel time… six point three. He plugged the data into his console and sent it to the Hornet, setting a self-destruct timer on his warhead. “Warhead set for 1189 meters, six-point-three flight time,” Häyhä said. “Check.”
“Uh, 1189, six point three? Concur,” his spotter said, running the numbers.
“Deconfliction check?”
“No friendlies in target area.”
Häyhä held his breath as the tower swayed left, then right. He didn’t aim where it was; he aimed where it would be, in the middle of its metronomic passage. “Sending,” he said simply. The vision in his 3D VR headset flared as the rocket under the drone ignited. Recoilless didn’t mean zero recoil. The rocket left the launcher tube, and the camera view dipped sharply toward the ground even though Häyhä immediately countered the blowback with his controls. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need to watch the round in flight. He was already piloting the Queen Hornet away and down out of view so it could live to shoot another day.
His spotter watched the round curve upward, and then down toward the distant tower, a thin trail of smoke in its wake. “Three… two…” Häyhä steadied his drone just above the ground, then turned his head to look at his spotter’s zoomed screen, centered on the tower. The vision flared, then settled, as a massive fireball erupted just over the transmitter, creating a thermal field 3,000 degrees hot and a shockwave 20 meters in diameter. When the flare died, nothing remained of the tower, the transmitter, or the three technicians. His spotter reached out to high-five him.
“First kill, Simo!” he said excitedly. “And a hat-trick too!” Häyhä didn’t ask to be given the nickname Simo. He had no family relation to the famous Finnish WWII sniper, Simo Häyhä, who claimed more than 500 Russian lives. But when his instructors on the rifle range had seen his uncanny ability to read the wind, humidity, and trajectory of his shot, Simo he was. He had been sent to the Utti Jaeger Regiment for sniper training and had later changed out his 7.62 mm Sako rifle for the RPG-armed Queen Hornet. And now the time had come to fulfill the promise of that storied name. He just grunted. “Let the ground crew know we are headed back to reload.”
“This is insane,” Lieutenant Dave ‘Flowmax’ Kamenir said over the radio, as he monitored the data flowing across his F-35's tactical display. “Check your battlenet feed, boss.”
His flight leader, Captain Georgia ‘Cyborg’ Leeson of the 495th Fighter Squadron ‘Valkyries’, flicked her eyes down to her own tac display and immediately saw what he was talking about. They were on patrol over the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia, about 60 km behind the contact line in the south, loaded for air-to-air tasking. Also circling north of them was a B-21 stealth bomber with glide bombs. And out ahead of them, along a fifty-kilometer-wide swath of the front, several hundred Ukrainian Lightning II drones were headed across the former DMZ to targets inside Russian-occupied Ukraine. So many, her battle management software was grouping them in swarms of 20 so that the monitor wasn’t just awash with blue drone icons. Someone down there is about to have a very bad day, Cyborg mused.
The first Ukrainian Lightning drones were just tubular aluminum and radar-transparent plywood copies of a propeller-driven Russian design, the Molniya. They had a 40 km range, seven-kilo payload, and jamming-resistant Starlink terminals that enabled them to strike targets up and down the contact line, and also deep into the Russian rear. But the deeper they flew, the easier they were to jam, even when Ukraine developed repeater technology aboard Lightning hub drones that boosted the control signal. During the two-year ceasefire, Ukraine deployed the Blyskavka, or Lightning II. Range was doubled to 80 km, payload to 10 kilos, and jamming resistance increased by the adoption of chaotic frequency hopping.
But the biggest advance was the addition of swarming AI and autonomous terminal guidance technology. Now, a single operator could pilot up to ten Blyskavka drones to an ingress waypoint and then set them free to hunt for targets from their onboard database. If they had clear air, they could coordinate their attacks, but if they were jammed, they simply hunted alone. Produced in factories from Denmark to Poland to Lviv in Ukraine during the ceasefire, Ukrainian production of the cheap and simple Blyskavkas quickly reached 1,000 a week.
On the first day of Dnipro Shield, the Ukrainian Blyskavka 2 inventory numbered more than 50,000, twice the volume of Russia’s unimproved Molniya or the comparable Geran 2s and 3s, which Russia had been firing at Coalition forces for the last several weeks. Cyborg saw the difference in strategies between Ukraine and Russia playing out on her tactical screen as night and day. While Russia was firing its drones at thousands of targets along the 2,000 km contact line, from Budjak in the west to Kharkiv in the east, or Belarus in the north, Ukraine was concentrating its massed drone assault on a single fifty-kilometer front.
That morning, its Uncrewed Air Systems operators had used strings of concussive thermobaric drones to blast routes through the Russian minefields lining the DMZ south of Zaporizhzhia. Each route was two kilometers wide and ten to twenty kilometers deep. Through those gaps in the minefields, Coalition mechanized infantry was pouring from dispersed staging points along the contact line.
And flying ahead of the armor were the drone swarms Flowmax was focused on. “Makes a guy feel just a little redundant, you know what I mean?” he said.
“Lightning drones can’t stop cruise missiles or Sukhois,” Cyborg reminded him. “That’s why we’re here.”
“Yeah? So where is Ivan?” Flowmax retorted.
It was a fair question. They had seen very little Russian air activity since the defeat of the Russian air offensive over Budjak and the destruction of their airfields on Crimea. Ukraine and the Coalition had superiority over Ukrainian and occupied Crimea airspace, and if the next few days of intensive air operations succeeded, they would also have superiority over the Dnipro Theater. “Stay sharp, he’s coming,” she told him.
Cyborg didn’t mind a clear threat board. But she knew it couldn’t last. Satellite intel had shown Russia was emptying its Central Command airfields and moving almost its entire inventory west to reconstitute or replace defeated Southern Command squadrons. It had lost most of its front-line Su-57 stealth fighter squadrons and dozens of precious Su-34 heavy attack aircraft, but emptying its Central Command reserves would give it 40 to 50 additional aircraft, most able to carry cruise missiles. The hiatus was too good to last, and of course, it didn’t.
The AWACS patrolling over Dnipro broke the quiet. “Bullet Four Four Alpha from Hounddog, we have work for you. Pushing data to you now.” Cyborg keyed her mic.
“Bullet Four Four ready, send.”
“Bullet Four Four, we have a transient aerial contact over Crimea, sector CC3, bearing one nine zero your position, altitude five to ten, range two seven zero. Close and investigate please, Bullet Four Four.”
“Roger, Bullet Four Four is buster for sector CC3, out.” She didn’t need to pass the order to Flowmax; he had been listening and dropped in on her starboard wing, looking across the gap in the sky as she turned them southwest.
“Transient? I guess Russia didn’t lose all its Felons after all…”
I guess not, Cyborg thought. Flowmax sounded nervy. Excited. The thought of a possible engagement some minutes into her future didn’t even cause Cyborg’s heart rate to spike. She started running through the myriad mental checklists she carried in her head, fingers darting around the cockpit as she set up her radar, optical-infrared, and signals sensors. Cyborg thrived in certainty—and combat engagements could be chaotic, but it was controlled chaos. If ‘A’ happened, you did ‘B.’ If ‘C’, then ‘D.’ Action, and reaction. And if you stayed cool and did it right, the other guy died, and you didn’t.
Cyborg Leeson wasn’t particularly afraid of dying, though. Death was a binary event, an on-off kind of thing. One moment you were, the next, you weren't. She wasn’t a fan of the idea she might be crushed or set on fire before she died, though, because that could be a long few seconds of terrifying pain. But then, she’d given birth without anesthetic and made it through that, so how bad could it be?
She pushed her aircraft into super-cruise, and Flowmax followed as she checked her systems. Forty thousand feet, six eighty knots. She finished her setup and made sure her multifunction advanced data link was streaming data securely and quietly between her and Flowmax. Flowmax would be doing the same. “Take separation,” she said. “You hunt right of the bearing, I’ll hunt left.”
“Roger, Four Four Bravo separating,” he said, breaking high and rolling right. They would both move into EMCON mode now, radio silent, radars emitting only stuttering thin beams with a low probability of triggering Russian detection systems. They reeled in the distance to the mystery contact as she worked her radar. Range, one eighty. If the contact was a fourth-gen aircraft, she should see it soon. Nothing yet. A ghost return? Or Russia’s first air reaction to the operation unfolding on the ground below?
Russian Aerospace Force Captain Dmitry ‘Slugger’ Bebenko, of the Russian 7th Air Group, 7000th Air Base, had been ordered to combat-test a new Russian uncrewed “loyal wingman” that had never been used in combat, and to do it in the hottest sector on the new front.
He’d been told it could prove decisive for a Russian Air Force desperately short of combat pilots and aircraft, but it seemed more likely to Slugger that it would be yet another Russian “superweapon” that didn't deliver on the hype. In either case, it seemed pretty likely to get him killed. Slugger had trained with the first prototypes of the small batwing-shaped 25-ton S-70 Okhotnik B ‘loyal wingman’ drone nearly five years earlier. On the plus side, they had a better build quality than his Felon, with smooth radar-absorbent skins and a single Saturn engine with a shrouded exhaust that hid its infrared signature nicely.
On the downside, and it was a big one, they had terrible avionics systems with a tendency to lose contact with their mothership and go rogue. One of the early prototypes had ditched its mothership during a test flight and crashed inside Ukraine, giving up all its secrets to the enemy. Luckily, he hadn't been flying that mission. He heard the pilot who did got the blame for ‘top secret Russian tech’ falling into the hands of the Americans. I bet they were impressed, Bebenko thought wryly. But so far, the two Okhotnik Cs Bebenko had prowling out ahead of him were behaving. And that was a good thing, since it sounded like Russia’s forces on the contact line south of Zaporizhzhia were taking a pounding.
Russia was best on the offense, able to generate thousands of drone and missile attacks for aerial assaults, or meat waves for infantry assaults. On defense, not so great. While Ukraine had been forced to innovate drone and missile interceptor tech to counter the relentless Russian air offensive, Russia hadn't, and didn't. So Bebenko’s mission was to take out the threat at its source: the vulnerable drone launch teams in their trucks, who set up a launch site in a forest clearing or field, got anything from one to hundreds of drones in the air, and then packed down and scooted for cover. For that, he had to get close—30 to 50 km close, which was why the job fell to Russia’s dwindling stealth assets, its Felons and Okhotniks.
He worked his signals detection interface as he closed on the Ukraine coast. His two Okhotnik Cs were in ‘sniffer mode’, soaking up signals energy from across the contact line, their AI looking for the very specific signatures of Ukrainian drone launch crews testing their links to the base where their pilots were hidden. By spreading his Okhotniks wide and positioning himself between them, he created a twenty-kilometer-wide antenna in the sky and could triangulate the source of the signals. So far, he had identified no fewer than ten sites inside a fifty-kilometer section of the front. That was how he knew how hot the battlefield down below was getting. And having found them, now he had to kill them. He flicked his eyes around the sky, checked his distributed aperture optical infrared sensors and radar warning receiver.
He could see several air defense radars behind the Zaporizhzhia front, and the occasional whisper of energy from Coalition or Ukrainian fighters flying combat air patrols, but nothing that indicated his approach had been identified yet. Of course, that risk would increase exponentially the closer he got to the Ukraine coast, but he had no intention of putting himself in harm’s way. It was his Okhotniks’ job to do the killing, and the dying. Targets locked. The four 500 kg weapons the Okhotniks carried, Drel or ‘Drill’ glide bombs, had to be launched between 30 and 40,000 feet, so he eased them higher, while he dropped down to the waves over the Black Sea. He resisted the urge to look over his shoulder for the two Su-27s that should be powering in from behind to cover him. Come on, come on… I’m down here with my ass hanging out, he muttered to himself. Checked his Okhotnik’s range to the first two targets, inside one fifty now. His own range… about one seventy. Too damn close. He needed those Su-27s to… Contrails! Left and right of him, he saw the thin white contrails of Russian long-range missiles arcing into the sky, headed upward. The cowards had launched at maximum range, of course, probably another 100 km behind him. You’d do the same if you were flying a Cold War piece of shit, Bebenko, admit it. He pulled back his throttle, settling into a slow cruise as he split off his Okhotniks, assigning four targets to each. They probably wouldn’t survive long enough to hit one, let alone all four, but he’d be safe over Crimea and could care less. ‘Slugger’ Bebenko hadn’t earned his nickname because of a pugnacious approach to air combat, more because of his ability to throw back prodigious amounts of liquor without passing out. And to do that, you had to be alive at the end of a mission.
The ‘upgraded’ Su-27 Flankers a hundred klicks behind Bebenko were indeed pieces of shit: their radars were virtually useless, they had a huge radar cross-section at any angle, and the heat from their twin Saturn engines could probably be seen from space. But they had two things going for them. Speed, with the ability to hit Mach 2.3 on afterburner, so they could close and launch their weapons and then bug out before other fourth-gen aircraft like the Coalition Rafale or Gripen were still trying to get a lock on them. And ordnance—they now carried the new Axehead ‘fire and forget’ hypersonic missile. All they had to do was pick an arc of sky where the enemy was suspected to be (which was basically the entire contact line right now, with the number of sorties the Coalition and Ukraine were flying) and launch anywhere from 100 to 300 km range before they got the hell out of Dodge. The missiles would do the rest, rising into the stratosphere before cruising down toward the target area at supersonic speeds, looking for enemy aircraft with both passive and active sensors. Once it locked onto an aircraft, it went hypersonic, closing in seconds. In the Budjak campaign, the Axehead had proven very effective against older fighters without 360-degree optical infrared sensors to warn them of its approach. Against the newer F-35, not so much.
“Four Four Alpha from Bravo. Contacts! Bearing one one five, altitude 30,000, range… two hundred fifty,” Flowmax announced. “They’re booking. Speed Mach 2, turning away…”
Cyborg frowned as the radar data from Flowmax’s aircraft appeared on her screen too. Two hundred and fifty kilometers range? But the contact they’d been sent to investigate was much closer. She smelled a rat. “Bravo,the radar signature says they are Flankers,” Cyborg replied. “No point chasing them. They probably already launched on our sector. It’s a decoy attack. Stay on task but prepare to respond. They could have launched anti-radiation missiles or Kinzhals, but it’s probably Axeheads.”
“Roger Alpha, searching for the closer contact,” Flowmax replied.
He sounded disappointed she hadn't let him off the leash to go after the Flankers. But her conclusion was based on the tactics she had seen Russia employ so far in this war. First, take out air patrols, AWACS, tankers. Then air defense radars with anti-radiation missiles and drones, and finally, bring in the Su-34 Fullbacks for ground attacks. If you had them. With older Su-27ss appearing over Crimea for the first time, it looked like Russia’s mothballed reinforcements had arrived. But last gen Flankers weren’t the main problem. The possibility of stealth aircraft closing on the contact line was.
She worked her radar, pinpoint beams of energy flicking across the sky as she closed on the ghost contact. Then her radar warning receiver chimed. A contact appeared and disappeared. “Four Four Bravo, I just got hit by L-band radar on RWR, bearing one eight zero.”
“Roger Alpha, searching down one eight zero,” Flowmax replied. “L-band? That is a Felon. I thought we'd downed them all.”
“Or they brought more in,” Cyborg replied, narrowing her radar search to the small arc of sky where the signals energy of a possible enemy came from. Then an icon appeared on the radar window in her helmet-mounted display as an audio warning sounded. Got you. “Bravo from Alpha, contact bearing one two five, altitude five thousand, range 140. Trying to hide in the wave clutter. AI classification: probable Su-57 Felon. Alpha will prosecute; watch my back. They hunt in pairs.” Flowmax had tangled with Felons during the Budjak action, and ended up hanging from a parachute over Turkey.
“Tell me about it, boss. Bravo has your six.” She pushed her throttle forward and brought up her ordnance menu, but that was as far as she got. Her missile proximity alert screamed, her DAS sensor screen blinked, highlighting an incoming missile, and she barely had time to deploy her towed decoy and start pumping countermeasures into the sky around her before the Axehead was upon her.
Bebenko’s own radar warning receiver was screaming at him too, showing not just one, but two F-35 radars had locked onto him. He flicked his control stick left, put his Felon into a tight banking turn, and pushed his nose lower as he put the enemy fighters in the notch of his wing root. His best hope was to lure their missiles into following him around and bury them in the sea as they tried to lead him. He started breathing hard, forcing oxygen into his lungs, adrenaline kicking in, his entire focus on the instruments and readouts that would help him survive the next few minutes. Then the RWR stopped screaming at him, as the enemy fighters lost their lock. Funny how the moment before you die is when you feel most alive, he reflected. The Flankers had actually done their job? Amazing. Even better, he had a bearing to the enemy fighters' position now. He brought his nose back around and focused long-range L-band energy down the bearing. Ping. Two contacts, range one ten. His Okhotniks were already passing either side of the Coalition patrol. Please survive the Flanker attack, Slugger prayed as he pulled his nose up and began climbing toward the Coalition patrol. I have a score to settle.
The Russian missile was pulled off track by Cyborg's towed decoy and exploded in her wake as it passed at nearly six times the speed of sound. Not close enough for the shrapnel to reach her, but close enough for the shockwave to shove her tail down like her Panther had just been slapped on the exhaust nozzle. She corrected, desperately scanning her sensors and the sky for more threats. She got on the radio to the AWACS. “Hound Dog, Bullet Four Four flight is defensive,” she said. “Warn all aircraft, Axeheads inbound.”
Their pursuit of the ghost contact made them the first Coalition flight to meet the missiles fired by the Flankers, but others back over Ukraine might soon have to respond to them too. She still had a problem of her own. Where is that damn Felon? Flowmax had also evaded an Axehead which had locked onto him and was climbing back up to mission altitude.
“Bravo, you got a bearing to the Felon?” Cyborg asked him.
Her data link told her he didn't, but she’d be happy with even a hunch. “Negative Alpha, had an L-band hit from 180 degrees, but only one and—shit… Missile! I got incoming. Bravo is defensive.”
Cyborg turned toward the new bearing, saw on her tac monitor that Flowmax was dealing with a new threat. Slower, supersonic. R-73 Vympel, she guessed. From that Felon.
“Bullet Four Four from Hound Dog, we have vectored Gila Two flight of two to your sector to support. They will be in support range in twenty seconds,” the AWACS advised.
She checked the tac screen, zoomed it out, saw the incoming flight of two F-35s tagged with the callsign ‘Gila Two’. And frowned. Royal Australian Air Force 3 Squadron? She didn't know they’d arrived in theater. Seconds later, a voice on her radio confirmed it, in a broad Australian drawl.
“Bullet from Gila Two, you called for room service?” the Australian pilot asked.
(To be continued :)